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What we learned from the People’s March about attitudes toward political violence

January 29, 2025


  • The 2025 People’s March turned out a crowd that was very similar in demographics to the first Women’s March in 2017. 
  • A third of participants at the People’s March (33%) reported that they believed that “because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Progressive activists march during the People's March in Washington, D.C. on January 18, 2025.
Progressive activists march during the People's March in Washington, D.C. on January 18, 2025. Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto

On January 18, 2025, a coalition of progressive groups organized the People’s March in Washington, D.C. Although the march was much smaller than the first Women’s March in 2017, which was the “largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history,” it still drew at least 100,000 activists to the city. In addition, solidarity actions took place in every state in the U.S., with over 200 events registered on the event’s action map.

As expected from an event in our nation’s capital, the majority of the participants were from the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. But members of the crowd reported traveling from as far away as Seattle, Washington to participate in the event, which was seen as the great granddaughter of that first Women’s March. Many were wearing pink “pussy hats” that they had taken out of the closet and dusted off. I also heard stories about women knitting new hats on the train and giving them out to fellow passengers who were headed to the march.

Following the same model I used to study the resistance that pushed back against the first Trump administration and its policies, I went out into the cold and damp day as part of an eight-person research team to survey participants in the 2025 People’s March. Data were collected from a random sample of participants as they assembled in Farragut Square, McPherson Square, and Franklin Park before marching to the Lincoln Memorial. We also surveyed participants as they waited for everyone to reach the Memorial for the speeches. In total, 453 people completed the survey (representing an 88% response rate).

In many ways, the people who turned out for this march two days before Trump’s second inauguration were very similar to those who participated in the resistance to his first administration: They were predominantly female, white, highly educated, and left-leaning. Also, like that first Women’s March, where 9o% of participants had voted for the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, 93% of the participants in the People’s March reported voting for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Figure 1

One of the main findings from my book on the resistance to the first Trump administration, “American Resistance,” was that the resistance groups channeled their outrage in the streets into resistance at the ballot box in 2018. However, my conversations with the participants in this year’s People’s March make me skeptical that most believe another election can solve the problems our country is facing.

In addition to the usual questions (and because there was an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021), we added an adapted version of a question from the American Values Survey to our survey that gauges participants’ perspectives on political violence.

A third of participants at the People’s March (33%) reported that they believed that “because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” This percentage is in stark contrast to the 18% of Americans who reported believing that political violence may be necessary in the 2024 American Values Survey. This proportion of the crowd is also much higher than the 21% of the American population who said political violence may be necessary to save our democracy when we fielded a nationally representative survey of the general public with YouGov during the week before the 2024 election (N = 1,000).

These findings are even more alarming when we dig deeper into the national data: The survey in August-September 2024 found that only 8% of Democrats supported political violence (versus 29% of Republicans and 16% of Independents). In our survey before the election, the views of left-leaning Americans had shifted, and 17% reported supporting political violence. By the day of the People’s March (January 18), support for political violence among left-leaning individuals who had overwhelmingly voted for Harris had grown further still to 33%.

To be clear, participants in the 2025 People’s March are not representative of all Democrats or even left-leaning Americans. However, these data clearly document that it is no longer just Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump who believe in political violence. Left-leaning Americans who are civically engaged and participate in peaceful, legally permitted demonstrations of resistance are starting to believe that political violence will be necessary to save America.

It’s important to remember that these data were collected two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated and proceeded to pardon all of the participants in the insurrection on January 6. When the president of the United States sends a signal that political violence will be tolerated, we all need to worry about what comes next. One can only wonder what the data will show in the coming weeks and months.

  • Footnotes
    1. Data were collected through YouGov, which fielded our survey to a representative sample of 1000 US adults the week before the 2024 election.

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